Page 98 of Head Room

“—indicates this group talks about all sorts of things.Negotiating the benefits maze, fishing, home repairs, dogs, fitness stuff, books, movies...and troubleshooting when one has an issue.

“A week or so before the cabin fire, Jardos started a topic.They deleted a lot of material the day Jardos went missing, including all of that topic.We’ve retrieved hardly any of that day’s discussion.I mean, whoever did it isgood.That other stuff they talked about was from earlier.All we can get once Jardos started that topic are pieces, like the cheese around the holes in Swiss cheese.And this Swiss cheese doesn’t have a whole lot of cheese.But—”

“Wait, Jennifer.Can we use any of this, Elizabeth?”Mike asked.

“We can’t report it on-air, but if it raises questions, we can try to get the answers.Those might be reportable.”

“Okay, so what’s in the cheese around the holes?”Mike asked.

“Fragments about his concern that something illegal is going on.And the sense that it’s sort of cloaked in the guise of being legal, that people — cloudy, unspecifiedpeople— are using legal tools to create illegal...somethings.I know.”Jennifer puffed out a sigh of disgust.“Is that vague enough?”

“Was Jardos doing more than mentioning these things?”I asked.

“Oh, yeah.He was trying to dig into them.There were definitely phrases about trying to find who was behind — whatever.”

“No clues to whatwhateverwas?”

“Nope.”

“Or guess ofwho?”

“Nope.”

Mike broke a rather deflated pause.“That’s interesting, but it doesn’t advance us, unless— What are the chances you can extract more info from what they deleted, Jennifer?”

“Soon?None.In a year or so, with tools getting better?Maybe.I’m telling you, these guys are good.Sorry.I know this doesn’t help.”

“Yes, it does,” Diana said.“Because we can draw from this that Jardos does not sound like a man preparing to take his life in grief over the death of his wife.That is a major question that’s been hanging over all of this.”

“But even if that’s strong enough to eliminate suicide — which I don’t think it is — it doesn’t answer if he was killed or if he might be a killer himself,” Mike said.

“There was one specific that came up,” Jennifer said.“A fragment about a lawyer likely being involved.No name, but Jardos wrote that, so maybe it’s somebody local.”

Between that and the vets’ comments, it was definitely time for me to call on James Longbaugh.

“That leaves you to report, Elizabeth,” Mike said.

I started with Hannah, since what Frank told her and his storing his wife’s quilts in her attic meshed with what Jennifer said as another indication of his anticipating problems.

“I thought I’d share photos of the quilts with Richard Alvaro.His sister was a quilting buddy of Irene’s, she should know names of the patterns or if there was anything hidden in the quilts that might be a clue or—”

“A deputy?No.Don’t do that.”Jennifer was aghast.“Send the images to me.We can run those through a friend’s software.It will match the patterns and tell us names.Should pick up any anomalies, too.”

A much better idea.

I agreed to do that as soon as we finished this conversation.“I’ll also send you the names of vets from Tom.Only a couple have first and last names and the first names might be nicknames.So it’s a real long shot, Jennifer.”

“If they served together, we can try a cluster algorithm...We’ll see what we can do.”

That was all any of us could do and it didn’t seem like much right now.

Perhaps sensing my mood and its potential contagion, Diana said, “The quilts do make it likely Jardos burned down the cabin.He rigged it to give the flag and manuscript their best chance of surviving, but he wasn’t taking chances with the quilts.He gave those to Hannah for safekeeping.The perfect choice.”

“Hannah?Perfect choice?”Mike asked.

“Oh, yes,” Diana said.“Because she would faithfully protect the box for him and she wouldn’t ask questions.”

“Probably wouldn’t occur to her,” Jennifer mumbled.